Sports and sports movies often lend themselves to self-aggrandizement. For professional athletes, it’s understandable: they’ve demonstrated an ability to perform their selected skill at a higher level than nearly every other human being on the planet. The same cannot be said for the amateur athlete. Despite that, the spillover effect of sports-star-cockiness infects regular gym rats everywhere, instilling self-important bros with brash bravado. Dreams of highly celebrated athletic achievements get reduced to victories in flag football scrimmages.

With Balls Out, Director Andrew Disney collects an assortment of upcoming sketch and improv stars to satirize the predictable sports underdog movie subgenre, while deflating the egos of anyone who has ever played backyard sports. Caleb (Jake Lacy) and his college friends attempt to recapture the magic that lead to their winning the intramural flag football championship in their freshman year. Caleb hasn’t seen any of the group since throwing the championship-winning pass that crippled his teammate Grant (Nick Kocher). But in his 5th year at 4-year college, with both marriage and a career on the horizon, Caleb throws himself back into “something that doesn’t matter” by reuniting the old team.

Like the 2004 Ben Stiller/Vince Vaughn vehicle DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, Balls Out seeks to undermine the genre by re-appropriating its tropes to an inherently insignificant situation. Balls Out goes one step further than its more mainstream predecessor by frequently and openly calling attention to its own story beats. When a wheelchair-bound Grant returns to the flag football team, he acknowledges his own shift to a gruff persona in order to assume the role of the team’s vulgar, grizzled coach/mentor. He melodramatically narrates the training montage, barks nonsensical orders and refers to his team as a ragtag bunch in hopes of inspiring their success.

That irreverent approach both helps and hurts Balls Out in different moments. The film is dense with scattershot punch lines. While not all of them land, the hit-to-miss ratio is solid enough to remain entertaining during the stretches when the film doesn’t take itself seriously. Balls Out might find its gang of roller-rink-dwelling homeless men funnier than I do; however, with a cast featuring Saturday Night Live contributors (Kate McKinnon, Beck Bennett, Nicholas Rutherford and Jay Pharoah), the BritaNick team (Kocher and Brian McElhaney), as well as a Derrick Comedy alum (D.C. Pierson) the comedic ability sells a majority of the jokes.

The satirical throughline is largely absent from Balls Out’s superfluous romantic subplot with the ever-charming Nikki Reed. Whereas the majority of this comedy lampoons clichéd story beats, this section to Balls Out could have just as easily been lifted into a movie starring Katherine Heigl and James Marsden. Both Lacy and Reed provide an affable presence, but their relationship is so clearly forecasted in the script that there’s little reason to care whenever her character is in a scene. Likewise, at 100 minutes long, the film could have probably lost a couple of its strikingly shot but minimally funny flag football montages.

Often, Balls Out is just pleasant enough. Its hilarious cast and the frequency of its laughs offer the movie a kind of lazy weekend VOD appeal, but its story lacks the ingenuity necessary to invest in these characters. The performances are the main reason to check out the film, if only to see some of these funny faces before they become staples of the next generation of comedy (scene stealer Kate McKinnon is already a female lead in Paul Feig’s upcoming all-female Ghostbusters reboot). Balls Out’s giggle inducing send up of sports movies is absurd fun, but its boilerplate plot is stretched transparently thin.

If there’s one thing director/co-writer Chris Lowell (mostly known for playing Piz in Veronica Mars) wants viewers to know, it’s that Beside Still Waters is shot on film. Shot on grainy 16mm and (partially) 8mm, Lowell embraces the textured look of the slowly dying format for his debut feature, inserting film burns and other analog “imperfections” throughout. Sure, it’s a little fetishistic at times, but Lowell’s choice is a smart one considering the film’s themes. This is a film about nostalgia, with characters reflecting back on their youth, sometimes succumbing to their desires for reliving the past. The format makes perfect sense, considering every character comes under the influence of their memories from a pre-digital era.

The screenplay, written by Lowell and Mohit Narang, sounds like another take on The Big Chill. Daniel (Ryan Eggold) invites his childhood friends over to his parents’ home for one final weekend; Daniel’s parents recently died in a car crash, and the home will get repossessed come Monday, prompting everyone to have one last party just like old times. One by one Daniel’s friends arrive, each with their own distinct personality: childish Tom (Beck Bennett), reality TV star James (Brett Dalton), high school sweethearts Abby (Erin Darke) and Martin (Will Brill), free spirit Charley (Jessy Hodges), and Daniel’s ex Olivia (Britt Lower). Olivia shows up unexpectedly, stunning everyone once she introduces them to her fiancé Henry (Reid Scott).

It doesn’t take long for the complicated relationships between this small circle of friends to get exposed. Daniel still isn’t over Olivia; Abby and Martin’s marriage is far from perfect; James and Charley have an on-again, off-again relationship. There are plenty of secrets between all seven friends, with most of them coming out once the booze starts flowing. Lowell and Narang, seemingly aware of how cost-prohibitive it is to shoot on film, waste little time establishing their characters. Interactions are brief and to the point, explaining just the right amount of information needed to push the narrative along. It’s to Lowell and Narang’s credit that the dialogue feels natural. By having conversations unfold in the context of old friends catching up, exposition doesn’t feel forced or stilted.

In fact, Beside Still Waters’ efficiency is the best thing going for it. Running at a brisk 76 minutes, there’s little time to dwell on character and story developments. That may sound like a detriment, but the quick pacing avoids the annoying task of waiting for the inevitable. The “Will they/Won’t they?” dynamic between Daniel and Olivia thankfully resolves itself immediately, and character secrets get exposed almost right after viewers learn about them. These plot elements (infidelity, homosexuality, marital troubles and jealousy, just to name a few) aren’t exactly refreshing, but Lowell understands that the drama comes out of watching characters reveal and react rather than withhold and avoid.

The best example of Beside Still Waters’ strengths happens during one inspired sequence the day after everyone parties too hard. Crosscutting between three sets of characters talking about what they did the night before, and edited to sound like one conversation, the scene covers several major narrative developments while establishing how open everyone is with each other. Lowell tries other potent methods of conveying information, but the results are somewhat mixed; his use of frequent cut-aways to quick-fire montages of still photos to emphasize themes of memory and nostalgia is a bit too on-the-nose.

But compared to other low-budget indie dramas, Beside Still Waters is distinctive, and not just because of its choice to shoot on celluloid. The weekend ends, and everyone goes their separate ways. There are no last act revelations for these characters. Most of them end up in a place similar to where they started, some for better and some for worse. It isn’t known whether or not anyone will stay in touch, or if they’ll ever see each other again. It’s an ending filled with loose ends, but it’s a satisfying ending. Good movies don’t need to wrap everything up.